A critical aspect of geometallurgy is quantifying mineralogical and textural relationships that affect mineral processing (eg, liberation and recovery). However, to date, this has been an expensive and time consuming venture and only minimal amounts of this type of data are typically available to be included in the mine planning process. Our research is focused on developing methods that will produce the required mineralogical and textural data rapidly and inexpensively. New methods of characterising liberation potential from image analysis of coarse particulate material and direct small-scale flotation measurement are compared with measurement of liberation at final grind size (ie conventional tests on MLA). The new tests are designed to rank the liberation potential of samples in order to classify an ore deposit into domains oflow, medium and high liberation potential. This parameter can then be used to adjust the cutoff used to differentiate ore from waste. Results to date show that all tests provide the same ranking for the samples. The measurement based on coarse particulate material compares favourably to the results from MLA analyses on the same samples. Further work is being carried out to determine which of the tests will be the most effective in terms of time, effort and cost.

Item Type:	Refereed Conference Paper
Keywords:	geometallurgy, MLA analysis
Research Division:	Engineering
Research Group:	Resources engineering and extractive metallurgy
Research Field:	Mineral processing/beneficiation
Objective Division:	Expanding Knowledge
Objective Group:	Expanding knowledge
Objective Field:	Expanding knowledge in the earth sciences
UTAS Author:	Hunt, J (Dr Julie Hunt)
UTAS Author:	Berry, R (Associate Professor Ron Berry)
ID Code:	120148
Year Published:	2011
Deposited By:	CODES ARC
Deposited On:	2017-08-11
Last Modified:	2018-03-16
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